kescusay

@kescusay@lemmy.world

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨OpenAI will not disclose GPT-5’s energy use. It could be higher than past models⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago⁩:

  Are you using Copilot in agent mode? That’s where it breaks shit. If you’re using it in ask mode with the file you want to edit added to the chat context, then you’re probably going to be fine.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨OpenAI will not disclose GPT-5’s energy use. It could be higher than past models⁩ ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago⁩:

  I’ve tried threats in prompt files, with results that are… OK. Honestly, I can’t tell if they made a difference or not.

  The only thing I’ve found that consistently works is writing good old fashioned scripts to look for common errors by LLMs and then have them run those scripts after every action so they can somewhat clean up after themselves.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨OpenAI will not disclose GPT-5’s energy use. It could be higher than past models⁩ ⁨⁨17⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago⁩:

  I have to test it with Copilot for work. So far, in my experience its “enhanced capabilities” mostly involve doing things I didn’t ask it to do extremely quickly. For example, it massively fucked up the CSS in an experimental project when I instructed it to extract a React element into its own file.

  That’s literally all I wanted it to do, yet it took it upon itself to make all sorts of changes to styling for the entire application. I ended up reverting all of its changes and extracting the element myself.

  Suffice to say, I will not be recommending GPT 5 going forward.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨This website is for humans⁩ ⁨⁨20⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago⁩:

  At my company, we had to implement all sorts of WAF rules precisely for that reason. Those things are fucking aggressive.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨ChatGPT Is Still a Bullshit Machine⁩ ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  More and more, for tasks like that I simply will not use an LLM at all. I’ll use a nice, predictable, deterministic script. Weirdly, LLMs are pretty decent at writing those.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨ChatGPT Is Still a Bullshit Machine⁩ ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  Not yet. I’ll give them a shot if they promise never to say “you’re absolutely correct” or give me un-requested summaries about how awesome they are in the middle of an unfinished task.

  Actually, I have to give GPT 5 credit on one thing: It’s actually sort of paying attention to the copilot-instructions.md file, because I put this snippet in it: “You don’t celebrate half-finished features, and your summaries of what you’ve accomplished are not only rare, they’re never more than five sentences long. You just get straight to the point.” And - surprise, surprise - it has strictly followed that instruction.

  Fucks up everything else, though.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨ChatGPT Is Still a Bullshit Machine⁩ ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  Software developer, here. (No, not a “vibe coder.” I actually know how to read and write my own code and what it does.)

  Just had the opportunity to test GPT 5 as a coding assistant in Copilot for VS Code, which in my opinion is the only legitimately useful purpose for LLMs. (No, not to write everything for me, just to do some of the more tedious tasks faster.) The IDE itself can help keep them in line, because it detects when they screw up. Which is all the time, due to their nature. Even recent and relatively “good” models like Sonnet need constant babysitting.

  GPT 5 failed spectacularly. So badly, in fact, that I’m glad I only set it to analysis tasks and not to any write tasks. I will not be using it for anything else any time soon.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Uber Eats is adding AI to menus, food photos, and reviews⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  As a software developer who is currently working on a “prompt engineering” task, the words “you are absolutely correct” are like knives to my soul now.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Linux Reaches 5% Desktop Market Share In USA⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Banning open source would basically destroy the entire Internet in the United States. No tech bro is going to want that.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨AI slows down some experienced software developers, study finds⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  That’s fair. I guess what I hate is what the term represents, rather than the term itself.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨AI slows down some experienced software developers, study finds⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  I actively hate the term “vibe coding.” The fact is, while using an LLM for certain tasks is helpful, trying to build out an entire, production-ready application just by prompts is a huge waste of time and is guaranteed to produce garbage code.

  At some point, people like your coworker are going to have to look at the code and work on it, and if they don’t know what they’re doing, they’ll fail.

  I commend them for giving it a shot, but I also commend them for recognizing it wasn’t working.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨AI slows down some experienced software developers, study finds⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Are you using agent mode?

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨AI slows down some experienced software developers, study finds⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  That’s still not actually knowing anything. It’s just temporarily adding more context to its model.

  And it’s always very temporary. I have a yarn project I’m working on right now, and I used Copilot in VS Code in agent mode to scaffold it as an experiment. One of the refinements I included in the prompt file to build it is reminders throughout for things it wouldn’t need reminding of if it actually “knew” the repo.

  • I had to constantly remind it that it’s a yarn project, otherwise it would inevitably start trying to use NPM as it progressed through the prompt.
  • For some reason, when it’s in agent mode and it makes a mistake, it wants to delete files it has fucked up, which always requires human intervention, so I peppered the prompt with reminders not to do that, but to blank the file out and start over in it.
  • The frontend of the project uses TailwindCSS. It could not remember not to keep trying to downgrade its configuration to an earlier version instead of using the current one, so I wrote the entire configuration for it by hand and inserted it into the prompt file. If I let it try to build the configuration itself, it would inevitably fuck it up and then say something completely false, like, “The version of TailwindCSS were using is still in beta, let me try downgrading to the previous version.”

  I’m not saying it wasn’t helpful. It probably cut 20% off the time it would have taken me to scaffold out the app myself, which is significant. But it certainly couldn’t keep track of the context provided by the repo, even though it was creating that context itself.

  Working with Copilot is like working with a very talented and fast junior developer whose methamphetamine addiction has been getting the better of it lately, and who has early onset dementia or a brain injury that destroyed their short-term memory.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨AI slows down some experienced software developers, study finds⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Like I said, I do find it useful at times. But not only shouldn’t it replace coders, it fundamentally can’t. At least, not without a fundamental rearchitecturing of how they work.

  The reason it goes down a “really bad path” is that it’s basically glorified autocomplete. It doesn’t know anything.

  On top of that, spoken and written language are very imprecise, and there’s no way for an LLM to derive what you really wanted from context clues such as your tone of voice.

  Take the phrase “fruit flies like a banana.” Am I saying that a piece of fruit might fly in a manner akin to how another piece of fruit, a banana, flies if thrown? Or am I saying that the insect called the fruit fly might like to consume a banana?

  It’s a humorous line, but my point is serious: We unintentionally speak in ambiguous ways like that all the time. And while we’ve got brains that can interpret unspoken signals to parse intended meaning from a word or phrase, LLMs don’t.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨AI slows down some experienced software developers, study finds⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Experience software developer, here. “AI” is useful to me in some contexts. Specifically when I want to scaffold out a completely new application (so I’m not worried about clobbering existing code) and I don’t want to do it by hand, it saves me time.

  And… that’s about it. It sucks at code review, and will break shit in your repo if you let it.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Companies That Tried to Save Money With AI Are Now Spending a Fortune Hiring People to Fix Its Mistakes⁩ ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  It’s true, although the smart companies aren’t laying off workers in the first place, because they’re treating AI as a tool to enhance their productivity rather than a tool to replace them.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Microsoft axe another 9000 in continued AI push⁩ ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  The thing is, if they just pared those claims down a bit, they’d be accurate. Switch from “Copilot can build an entire application for you from scratch while giving you a blowjob” to “Copilot can help developers by automating some repetitive and time-consuming tasks,” and you still have a good thing.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Microsoft axe another 9000 in continued AI push⁩ ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Weird. The cuts apparently include cancellation of several games that were planned and many of them will hit the Xbox division.

  I would’ve thought that the increased productivity that Copilot theoretically gives developers would have resulted in the reduced staff still being able to finish those games.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨We need to stop pretending AI is intelligent⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  Autocomplete on steroids, but suffering dementia.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Your TV Is Spying On You⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  Yep. My TV has not and never will be on the Internet in any way. I picked it for its screen quality, and the fact that it also has “smart” components never even entered into the decision. Because those smart components will literally never do anything.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Vibe coding is to coding what microwaving is to cooking.⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  I don’t think that comparison is apt. Unlike with music, there are objectively inefficient and badly-executed ways for a program to function, and if you’re only “vibing,” you’re not going to know the difference between such code and clean, efficient code.

  Case in point: Typescript. Typescript is a language built on top of JavaScript with the intent of bringing strong and static type-checking sanity to it. Using Copilot, it’s possible to create a Typescript application without actually knowing the language. However, what you’ll end up with will almost certainly be full of the any type, which turns off type-checking and negates the benefits of using Typescript in the first place. Your code will be much harder to maintain and fix bugs in. And you won’t know that, because you’re not a Typescript developer, you’re a Copilot “developer.”

  I’m not trying to downplay the benefits of using Copilot. Like I said, it’s something I use myself, and it’s a really helpful tool in the developer toolbox. But it’s not the only tool in the toolbox for anyone but “vibe coders.”

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Vibe coding is to coding what microwaving is to cooking.⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  I’m of two minds on this.

  On the one hand, I find tools like Copilot integrated into VS Code to be useful for taking some of the drudgery out of coding. Case in point: If I need to create a new schema for an ORM, having Copilot generate it according to my specifications is speedy and helpful. It will be more complete and thorough than the first draft I’d come up with on my own.

  On the other, the actual code produced by Copilot is always rife with errors and bloat, it’s never DRY, and if you’re not already a competent developer and try to “vibe” your way to usablility, what you’ll end up with will frankly suck, even if you get it into a state where it technically “works.”

  Leaning into the microwave analogy, it’s the difference between being a chef who happens to have a microwave as one of their kitchen tools, and being a “chef” who only knows how to follow microwave instructions on prepackaged meals. “Vibe coders” aren’t coders at all and have no real grasp of what they’re creating or why it’s not as good as what real coders build, even if both make use of the same tools.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Half of companies planning to replace customer service with AI are reversing course⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  Seems like it’s cheaper and more efficient just to pay people to fuck on camera.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Half of companies planning to replace customer service with AI are reversing course⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  Oh my God… The best/worst thing about the idea of AI porn is how AI tends to forget anything that isn’t still on the screen. So now I’m imagining the camera zooming in on someone’s jibblies, then zooming out and now it’s someone else’s jibblies, and the background is completely different.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨The Case for Software Craftsmanship in the Era of Vibes — Zed's Blog⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  The trick to using an AI agent effectively is already knowing exactly what you want, typing the request out in excruciating detail, and being a good developer who properly reviews code so you catch all the errors and repetition the AI agent will absolutely include.

  So… Yeah. 100% agree. AI agents are useful, but impossible to use if you aren’t already skilled with code.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Apple just proved AI "reasoning" models like Claude, DeepSeek-R1, and o3-mini don't actually reason at all.⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Well, technically, yes. You’re right. But they’re a specific, narrow type of neural network, while I was thinking of the broader class and more traditional applications, like data analysis. I should have been more specific.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Apple just proved AI "reasoning" models like Claude, DeepSeek-R1, and o3-mini don't actually reason at all.⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  That’s only part of the problem. Yes, JavaScript is a fragmented clusterfuck. Typescript is leagues better, but by no means perfect. Still, that doesn’t explain why the LLM can’t recall that I’m using Yarn while it’s processing the instruction that specifically told it to use Yarn. Or why it tries to start editing code when I tell it not to. Those are still issues that aren’t specific to the language.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Apple just proved AI "reasoning" models like Claude, DeepSeek-R1, and o3-mini don't actually reason at all.⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  But it still manages to fuck it up.

  I’ve been experimenting with using Claude’s Sonnet model in Copilot in agent mode for my job, and one of the things that’s become abundantly clear is that it has certain types of behavior that are heavily represented in the model, so it assumes you want that behavior even if you explicitly tell it you don’t.

  Say you’re working in a yarn workspaces project, and you instruct Copilot to build and test a new dashboard using an instruction file. You’ll need to include explicit and repeated reminders all throughout the file to use yarn, not NPM, because even though yarn is very popular today, there are so many older examples of using NPM in its model that it’s just going to assume that’s what you actually want - thereby fucking up your codebase.

  I’ve also had lots of cases where I tell it I don’t want it to edit any code, just to analyze and explain something that’s there and how to update it… and then I have to stop it from editing code anyway, because halfway through it forgot that I didn’t want edits, just explanations.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Apple just proved AI "reasoning" models like Claude, DeepSeek-R1, and o3-mini don't actually reason at all.⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  I can envision a system where an LLM becomes one part of a reasoning AI, acting as a kind of fuzzy “dataset” that a proper neural network incorporates and reasons with, and the LLM could be kept real-time updated (sort of) with MCP servers that incorporate anything new it learns.

  But I don’t think we’re anywhere near there yet.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨If AI was going to advance exponentially I'd of expected it to take off by now.⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Ah, did they finally fix it? I guess a lot of people were seeing it fail and they updated the model. Which version of ChatGPT was it?